Gravity Works

*
Measure a thousand times and cut once. The mantra of a person who is certain of their task.


*
I don’t remember where I was the first time I did it, not the color of the room or the décor. I don’t remember the time of day or whether there was music or silence.

What I do remember is the feeling – the awkward placement of my thumb and forefinger backwards over the handle of the scissors and how quickly the coldness of the blade crossing over my skin changed to hot blood. And then that strange sense of relief, as if there was light entering into me through a passage I created.

I have twenty-nine visible scars and countless numbers faded away, most of them evenly spaced and leaning at the same angles – the mathematics of my mistakes. Each one had a purpose and a exactness, each one created to release some suffocation from my body.

There have been a few haphazard slopes, a break from my usual surgical precision. They splay and curve across with no method, the combat wounds of someone with no time to waste.

I remember thinking that this was how a blood transfusion must feel: slowly, slowly drained and then full of something new, something uninfected, like sunlight through an open window.


*
She remembers reading somewhere, “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

The only way. The only way. She says it in her head over and over like a song, played out to the drum of her pulse. There is not one drop of blood left inside her veins that does not throb to this chant. The only way. The only way.


*
A shark can detect a single drop of blood in 25 million drops of water and can sense the electricity emitted from living creatures.
I think about being a shark, and how I might have been one once.

Every person I have ever loved and who has loved me is inside me somewhere, pulsing through my veins, living in my body. I can feel their electricity beating in my heart, keeping the rhythm steady.

Sometimes I wish they’d let me rest.


*
This is the geography of a life. Simple rhythms and hidden avenues of air in the veins where there should be blood.

This is the secret structure of the world. Everyone treading and pacing over their pain, keeping the heart beat steady in the people we love so we won’t have to be alone while our bodies decay in slow motion, like rotting cargoes abandoned in the ocean.

Our hearts don’t beat on their own; we keep each other’s rhythms.


*
We all have thunderstorms, some that brood for heavy hours. And I let mine pour out of me, to feel the quiet fill me up.

What choices can I make without knowing what it is to rest, always awake to the never-ending thumping of the heart and the rushing of the blood around my body carrying all the people who have loved me and whom I have loved.

Each year that we grow older, our skin becomes more translucent, like a bare bulb, displaying the infinity of thunderstorms and all the love that courses through our veins.

Pour them out. Pour them out. It’s the only way.

[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]